Top 25 semiconductor companies in 2012, ranking by IC Insights

IC Insights has updated the top 25 semiconductor companies which include merchant chip makers, foundries and fables companies. The top 25 worldwide semiconductor (ICs and O-S-Ds—optoelectronics, discretes, and sensors) sales leaders for 2012 include 10 suppliers headquartered in the U.S., seven in Japan, three in Taiwan, three in Europe, and two in South Korea, a relatively broad representation of geographic regions. The top 25 ranking also includes three pure-play foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and UMC) and six fabless companies. Below is the latest analysis shared by IC Insights: It is interesting to note that the top five semiconductor suppliers all have different business models. Intel being essentially a pure-play IDM, Samsung a vertically integrated IC supplier, TSMC a pure-play foundry, Qualcomm a fabless company, and TI a fab-lite semiconductor supplier. In 2012, the pure-play foundries and fabless companies were the star performers. IC foundries are included in the top 25 semiconductor supplier ranking because IC Insights has always viewed the ranking as a top supplier list, not as a marketshare ranking, and realizes that in some cases semiconductor sales are double counted. With many of our clients being vendors to the semiconductor industry (supplying equipment, chemicals, gases, etc.), excluding large IC manufacturers like the foundries would leave s...